Tag Archives: technology

ROME and KAMUELA, HI–(Marketwire – December 30, 2009) – Past Perfect Productions, srl, the Rome-based company representing “Rome Reborn,” and Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc. headquartered in Kamuela, Hawaii, and home of the “Family Forest® Project” today announce joining forces to form an alliance for licensing core elements for the next generation of AAA console-based 3D games.

Today the owners of the licensing rights to two immense, academically precise digitization projects, each requiring over a decade of research and development, have united in a Joint Marketing Alliance. Their goal is to provide the means for a visionary game publisher to take a giant, cost-effective leap forward in creating the next generation of 3D console games. The theme of the games to be developed with the combined digital content is “participatory time travel” with ancient Rome as the ultimate destination with celebrity avatars serving as ancestral tour guides to the past.

“We recognized immediately upon learning of Rome Reborn last year, when its licensing agreement with Google Earth was announced, how ancient Rome in their detailed 2.0 version would provide a wonderful ‘end-game destination’ for a breakthrough, ‘time travel’ 3D game utilizing digitized ancestral pathways mapped out from the Family Forest® Project. It makes a perfect fit because ‘all paths lead to Rome’ — and that includes ancestral pathways,” according to Bruce H. Harrison, co-founder and CEO of Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc.

Ancestral Marketing Partners, under the direction of Tom Nocera, has been tapped to market the digital rights of alliance partners to game publishers and game developers. Nocera stated, “The alliance offers all the unique digital content needed to bring the next generation of video games into the homes of a vast ‘non-traditional’ gamer audience — as well as appeal to traditional game consumers. Content this significant has to be showcased using video, and we were fortunate to find in New York the editor with a talent big enough to tell the story. Matthew Belinkie gets a ‘tip of the hat’ for what he has created for www.r2f2.com the alliance website.”

Professor Bernard D. Frischer of the University of Virginia is credited with having the vision and leadership to guide the digitization of ancient Rome, precisely as it appeared in 320 A.D., the height of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great. Frischer welcomed news of the alliance, stating, “The combination of our scientifically certified architectural model with the enormous Family Forest® genealogical database provides the basis for a compelling serious game that can entertain and educate people today about ancient Rome and its relevance to the contemporary world.”

Joel Myers, CEO of Past Perfect Productions, stated, “The alliance is a powerful combination of digital assets, a classic example of how the whole adds up to much more than the sum of the parts. All that is missing now is a brilliant game designer to bring Rome and its citizens to life once again for people of all ages and backgrounds around the world.”

I rediscovered a great quote while thumbing through one of my very many stacks of research materials. It accurately describes one of the foundation concepts steering the growth of the Family Forest® Project.

The quote is from Andrew McNally IV, president of Rand McNally and great-grandson of one of its co-founders. Andrew said “Making the world around us more understandable is what map-making has always been about.”

Another of our goals is to have a combination Google Earth/Second Life type interface for virtually exploring the world’s largest maps of human genetic migration, which are generated by the highest quality and most intricately interconnected web of networked family ties.

Please stay tuned for the introduction of 200 or so selected Family Forest® Kinship Reports from the Family Forest® National Treasure Edition which will connect countless millions of living people, through their own generation-by-generation family ties, to more celebrities and historical figures than any other resource available anywhere, either on or off line.

Knowing your genealogy can actually be worth substantial money to you, and life-changing knowledge can be beyond priceless, truly of incalculable value.

For instance, having the knowledge I just discovered could have given a life-changing advantage of monumental value to one of your ancestors, to you, and to your descendants.

In fact, if one of your ancestors had discovered this key knowledge when they really needed it, you and your descendants would have been born into an entirely different and almost certainly much better socio-economic environment.

And you or one of your descendants may be standing at that very crossroads right now.

The amazing Google Book Search was the source of one key piece of knowledge that led me to the pleasing discovery that the Family Forest® contains an additional treasure trove of priceless knowledge that I was unaware of.

This particular gem of knowledge was found in a book that has been in the Harvard College Library for over a century. This book is number 299 of a 300 edition printing of a 1905 genealogy book about the Kingsbury family. A sticker in the front of the book says:

“From the Bright Legacy. Descendants of Henry Bright, jr., who died at Watertown, Mass., in 1686, are entitled to hold scholarship in Harvard College, established in 1880 under the will of Jonathan Brown Bright of Waltham, Mass., with one half the income of this Legacy. Such descendants failing, other persons are eligible to the scholarships. The will requires that this announcement shall be made in every book added to the Library under its provisions.”

One of these is the surname of a friend who was struggling last fall to find funds to give his daughter a good college education. A couple of them are names of members of my church congregation, one is one of Kristine’s ancestors, four are some of my ancestral surnames, and some are names and/or ancestral surnames of people we see regularly in the news.

How many people who are entitled to basically free money from their ancestors are completely unaware of it? How many people with unusual surnames such as Ahrens, Dvojacki, or Passarella, or common surnames such as Baker, Clark, or Smith, would know that they had ancestors with the surname of Bright, and that this knowledge can entitle members of their family to a life-changing advantage?

Bill Gates probably didn’t mean it exactly the way it sounded, but he did say on The Charlie Rose Show that “Everything is web-based.”

Everything is not web-based yet, and here’s one example that relates to cousin Bill personally, and quite possibly professionally.

Bill can give his children an enriching digital edutainment gift of potentially limitless value for just $50, and he cannot acquire anything similar to it now from Microsoft, or Google, at any price. This gift cannot be explored online – yet.

But offline, with just a few mouse-clicks in the Family Forest® Bill and Melinda Gates’ children can summon maps of their own ancestral pathways that lead directly from them and travel generation-by-generation to countless ancestral homes from many centuries ago, including some very prominent ones within the Gates family’s summer vacation destination, France.

Even with the basically unlimited resources of Microsoft, or Google, it seems that it will still be years before anyone can deliver the full functionality of even yesterday’s Family Forest® online (and that edition is basically only a concept sketch of the National Treasure Edition we are preparing to release next).

Two leading edge digital delivery companies have been trying to bring tiny slivers of Family Forest® output online.

Google has been working at it for over four months now, and they are not quite there yet (in fairness to Google, one is believed to be the world’s longest ebook). After having the same digital content for six months, in June 2008 ebrary estimated that it might be able to successfully make our rich content fully functional online within their system in the second half of 2009. And we’re only talking about slivers of stage-two digital content from where we were in 2005.

Some digital property, such as the Family Forest®, is beyond the capabilities of today’s Internet, but will be an integral part of the exciting future Internet that Bill talks about with Charlie Rose.

We envision people experiencing online virtual visits with their early ancestors in 3-D VR re-creations of their ancestral homes. As they have been many saying for many millennia, “All paths lead to Rome,” and the Family Forest® proves it.

Among many other best-of claims, the Family Forest® is the best digital central source for generation-by-generation ancestral pathways leading from today to Ancient Rome.

When the Internet evolves enough to deliver the full functionality of the Family Forest® online, our proprietary network of strategic digital links will be performing the service of a high-speed transportation system (much like express elevators) connecting living people to many of their ancestors and their ancestral homes in centuries past.

For an example, just look at the wide-ranging large list of some of the better-known people who are descendants of just one French castle. Or better yet, as soon as Google Books can successfully deliver it online, explore what we believe is the world’s largest ebook, which documents a very large number of the known descendants of Briquebec Castle.

The founder of Briquebec Castle has ancestral pathways in the New World Edition which lead from him back to Ancient Rome. Many millions of living people may be as close as a few generations away from connecting to their own ancestral pathways which lead to Briquebec Castle. And of course, there will be tens of thousands of additional connecting points in the National Treasure Edition to this and other castles.

How accurate are these generation-by-generation ancestral pathways that lead from present day (or the recent past) to Ancient Rome and beyond? The answer can be found here. Stay tuned to Your Future, Your Past for previews of other exciting future possibilities from our digital property.

When ancient mariners returned from their voyages of discovery, they turned their records and logs over to monastic type individuals (map makers, cartographers) who would turn that data into maps which other mariners would use on subsequent journeys to the same regions.

When those mariners returned, they turned their new records and logs over to same monastic type individuals who would then use the new data to make corrections and improvements to those maps, and then produce new maps that other mariners would use on subsequent journeys to the same regions.

Over the centuries many have journeyed to ancestral regions and brought back their findings. I am comparing and distilling those findings, digitally connecting the dots of recorded history according to where the experts say they should be connected, and producing new maps of generation-by-generation ancestral pathways that zigzag through thousands of years of recorded history through the lives of actual people.

Most of these maps have never been seen before, and visually following one’s curiosity through the world’s largest maps of human genetic migration can be truly fascinating and enriching.